


An Extremely Uneventful Subject

by howlikeagod



Category: Kane and Feels (Podcast)
Genre: Domesticity, M/M, OR IS IT, The Rumor Come Out: does lucifer kane is gay?, i just needed to get this out there, i'm gonna write something more Substantial for them soon i promise, i've never posted in a fandom with a tag that doesn't exist yet before... wrow, mentions of cannibalism, unrequited pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 04:27:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17860280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/howlikeagod
Summary: Brutus is a large man—understatement—who seems only comfortable enough with the fact due to a lifetime of trying to make himself smaller and failing miserably. He takes the space he takes, and nothing more.Lucifer feels… a way, about that.A quiet night in the offices of Kane and Feels.





	An Extremely Uneventful Subject

**Author's Note:**

> my brain: *skips right over demon-punching and potentially angsty reunion tropes and lands on OH MY GOD THEY WERE ROOMMATES*
> 
> title from "No Choir" by Florence + the Machine

Although he would detest both the comparison and the cliche, Lucifer Kane stands in the doorway of his flat in the precise form and demeanor of a drowned kitten.

Feels looks up from his book—Foucault,  _ Folie et Déraison, _ with whom he has been having a torrid on-again off-again affair for nearly six months—and takes the slender stem of his glasses in two broad fingers. He pulls them from their nest in his hair, where they had flashed with the reflected gray light like a second pair of seeing eyes. They settle back onto the bridge of his nose. Finally, he takes in the sight.

“Is it raining?”

“No,” Kane snaps as he kicks the door shut. “I thought a stroll through the duck pond in the park was just the ticket in the middle of February. Yes, Brutus, it’s raining.”

“Mm.” Brutus hums in acknowledgement, calm and steady where Lucifer spits and hisses with annoyance—metaphorically, of course. He sets about making tea.

He moves improbably, Brutus Feels. Kane has always thought so, though he has not always thought so deeply about it. Standing in the doorway in a spreading puddle of his own unhappy design, socks soaked through so thoroughly he fears to unlace his shoes, there is nothing better to be done than watch his partner stand and make his way assuredly through the clutter of their flat. Brutus is a large man—understatement—who seems only comfortable enough with the fact due to a lifetime of trying to make himself smaller and failing miserably. He takes the space he takes, and nothing more.

Lucifer feels… a way, about that. He might call it admiration and he might call it envy, but either feels monumentally selfish given the circumstances. Still, it might have done him good to learn, sooner rather than later, to leave room for others. To share, to play nice, to remember the world is not his to consume.

He shakes himself out of the thought. The rain and the chill from being soaked to the bone are more than enough to make him maudlin. Lucifer focuses his eyes again and realizes they’ve unconsciously come to rest on Brutus’s backside.

“Sugar, Luce?”

“What?”

Brutus half turns, face and thick hair in geometric profile against the kitchen window.

“Do you want sugar?” He holds up a cup and a kettle: the usual trappings of, yes,  _ tea.  _ The tea he started making, the tea he is talking about.

“Yes, thanks.” Lucifer shivers. He sloughs off his blazer, which was expensive and really should be cleaned as soon as possible, and starts to unlace his shoes. For good measure, he peels his socks off as well. After a moment of deliberation, he throws them sloppily in the general direction of the radiator.

Brutus has started  _ humming.  _ Lucifer opens his mouth to complain, as he always does, but the thought dies quietly somewhere along his brainstem. The soles of his damp feet stick uncomfortably to the old wood floor that needs sweeping. He creeps closer nonetheless. He wants Brutus to continue, a desire with which he startles himself. He wants to know what the melody is, if it’s an old showtune or a ditty from a Disney cartoon or a jingle to advertise dish soap.

“Here’s your—Oh!” Brutus turns around and nearly smacks Lucifer in the face with his elbow, held aloft for the twin teacups in his hands. “Don’t sneak up on me like that. God, you’re soaked. Do you want, I dunno, a towel, or—”

“I’ll be fine,” Lucifer mutters. 

He takes the tea gingerly from Brutus without touching the man’s hand. The thought of brushing against his warm skin while Lucifer himself is clammy as a dead fish makes him feel… unpleasant. Like the struggling envy he felt watching Feels’s body’s uncanny grace.

Steam curls around the cold tip of Lucifer’s nose. Brutus sits down with his own cup, not in his chair but on the sofa, where there is an enormous knit blanket and plenty of room for two men to sit in companionable proximity.

Well. It’s as good an invitation as any.

Lucifer takes his seat. Brutus makes a dent in the cushion on his side deep enough that anyone joining him inevitably slides into his personal space over the course of an evening. It is simply a matter of efficiency, then, to sit close enough that their hips nearly touch.

“You’re dripping on the damn sofa. At least,” Brutus laughs, “at least put the blanket down first, come on.”

Before Kane can reach for the blanket himself, Brutus stretches a long arm across and pulls it from its perch over the back of the sofa, where it had been curled up and draped like a sleeping snake. Brutus’s arm briefly rests behind Lucifer’s neck, across his shoulders—Christ, but he’s warm.

Lucifer grumbles, pissier than he really feels, as Brutus tucks the blanket around him.

“I’m not a  _ child,  _ Feels.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Brutus smiles at him so, so softly. He’s…  _ kind.  _ He cares so damn much about everyone and everything. Where he finds the energy, Lucifer can’t imagine.

A bright, incomprehensible warmth flares gently in Kane’s chest at that soft look. He tamps it down with annoyance. Feels cares about him, yes, but as previously stated: he cares about  _ everyone. _ Kane is nothing special in that regard. Pretending otherwise  _ is  _ childish, unlike the way he pulls the blanket around himself like a chrysalis.

An old wound makes itself known at the thought, too:  _ Person you like—Person you pretend to like—Person you use.  _ Lucifer Kane has quite a lot to make up for in that area.

He breaks eye contact and sips the tea. It’s hot but not scalding, sweet but not overbearing. Brutus is very good at making tea.

“Good,” Lucifer says.

“What?”

“The—The tea. It’s good.”

“Ah. Yeah, nice weather for it.”

Lucifer huffs. Brutus’s face cracks on a grin. It changes the shape of him, somehow. Brutus is careful, and one of the things he is unerringly careful  _ with  _ is his own interiority. He doesn’t often smile when he isn’t reassuring a tearful client—that is to say, he doesn’t often smile without purpose.

In this case, his purpose is to be an utter brat.

“You know, rather than teasing me in my hour of misery, a simple  _ thank you  _ might be in order,” Lucifer complains. There is no bite behind the words. He is too comfortable now to sustain real irritation.

“Thank you, then, Luce,” Brutus agrees easily. “What am I thanking you for?”

“Walking all the way to the funeral home and back in this sodding weather,  _ just  _ because you decided taking the Cat to get its shots was more important than our livelihood—”

“The Cat,” Brutus interrupts, “is vital to the whole operation. Funeral home?”

“For the case.”

“Ah, right, with the cannibalism.”

“Anthropophagy, technically,” Lucifer corrects. “It would only be cannibalism if the thing that ate her grandfather were human.”

“Have we ruled that out?”

“We have now,” he says grimly. He sips the tea again. “Ooh, you added lemon.”

“I’ve been experimenting.”

“Nice touch.”

They drink tea and they talk. About the case, about things that aren’t the case, mundane and unmemorable as the rain falls and falls out the window. The Cat curls up on Lucifer’s lap, having emerged from some uncharted crevice of the flat.

Brutus begins to read again as Lucifer runs his still-chilly hands over the Cat’s purring form. He ought to get work done, he thinks, or make some other productive use of his time. But the rain is pattering softer, now, and Brutus’s shoulder is a remarkably comfortable place to rest his head. He dozes.

“Luce,” a gentle jostling and Brutus’s gentle voice wake him up. Kane opens his eyes to the familiar geography of his partner’s face.

“Mm, what,” Lucifer grumbles through a sticky-dry mouth. “Are we being eaten?”

Brutus laughs. He has such a  _ nice  _ laugh. In this in-between place straddling waking and as normal a sleep as he ever gets, a part of Kane firmly believes that the sound of Feels’s laughter is the only thing keeping him grounded; if he went too long without, he would run mad entirely.

“I’m getting ready for bed,” Brutus explains. “I didn’t want to wake you, but I know what the couch does to your back.”

“Right, old friend.” Lucifer stretches out the emergent crick in his neck. His lap is still warm from the phantom weight of the Cat, though the animal itself is gone. “Considerate of you.”

As Brutus putters around at his nightly routine and Lucifer changes out of his hopelessly wrinkled clothes, he cannot help but dwell on that moment of waking. Of awakening. A thought occurred to him in the second after he opened his eyes that, if he’s honest, has him spooked.

He thinks—He wants—That is, he wouldn’t mind waking up to the sight of Brutus again.

The more he thinks about it, the more he turns it over and over in his mind like a coin trick, an undeniable fact presents itself on every surface of the ordeal: he’s wanted this for quite some time. Wanted all the implications that come with it.

He pulls up his soft pajama pants and steels his mind and soul against it. Hadn’t he only just said, he needs to learn that not everything is  _ for him? _ Least of all people, least of all Feels.

The ache will go away, flaring up suddenly as it did like a grease fire; it will vanish just as quickly. Silly of him, really. He must be overtired.

“Do you need a shower?” Brutus calls through the door. Lucifer opens it to see the man himself, devoid of glasses and wearing nothing but his boxers. 

If he had meant to say something in response, it vanishes along with the rest of his higher functions at the sight.

“I only asked because I was going to get in, and I know you usually shower in the morning, but with the whole rain thing I—”

“No,” Kane shakes himself out of it. He really needs that full night’s rest. “No, go right ahead.”

“Alright. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

“Oh, Kane?”

“Feels?”

“You,” Brutus giggles, “might want to at least wet down your hair, though. You look like a cockatiel.”

Lucifer sputters indignantly to Brutus’s retreating back.

He shuts the door. Lucifer turns, glances in the mirror, and nearly yelps at the sight of his hair, dried during his nap in a haphazard mohawk.

“Well,” Lucifer huffs to no one but himself. “Maybe I’ll wear it like this  _ all  _ the time, how would you like  _ that. _ Maybe I want to look like a cockatiel, did that ever occur to you?”

Brutus, showering and then trundling off to sleep in his own bed in his own room, doesn’t answer.

Lucifer brushes his teeth in the kitchen sink. The moment he catches sight of his half-transparent reflection in the window, he is weighed down quite suddenly by a tiredness that loops around his neck like a noose. It has been a long day—a long week, a long  _ life,  _ and he has no one to help him carry it save himself.

_ That isn’t entirely true, _ he muses as he climbs into bed. He has Feels.

A  _ But— _ tacks itself onto the end of the thought like a whispering demon of dreams. He pushes it away as easily as one: no but, no and, no addendum. He has Feels in his life, by his side, period. End of clause and of paragraph.

Lucifer Kane falls into sleep and does not know if he hopes he will dream or not.


End file.
